As part of the process for servicing printers at customer sites in the field, printer specific data is collected and entered into a warranty database. This data includes information relating to the printer configuration and information relating to the printer performance. The warranty database serves as a source for a large volume of product quality and reliability information for printer products which have been shipped to customers. The information collected for the warranty database allows an ongoing analysis of the field quality and reliability of printer products to be performed. Through the use of the warranty database information, product problems are identified and the necessary corrective action is implemented in the field and/or at customer sites.
Typically, the data collected for the warranty database includes such basic information as the product model number, some sort of failure code used to classify the problem, a repair code to identify, at a relatively high level, the cause of the problem, and the actions undertaken to correct the problem. On occasion, problems arise in the field involving printer products for which it is required, generally because of the magnitude of the problem, that a very thorough investigation of the problem is performed to determine, at a very basic level, the cause of the problem. It is also sometimes the case that the root causes of the problems printers experience in the field are not easily determined and, for these cases, certain kinds of additional information in the warranty database would be very helpful to assist in determining the root causes of the problems.
The usual process for collection of this information involves customer service personnel manually recording the information for later manual entry into the warranty database. Given the time available for service personnel to perform service calls and the time required for recording collected information on customer service reports, collection of more than the basic information becomes impractical. In addition, manual collection of even the basic information is likely to introduce a substantial number of errors into the warranty database, thereby compromising its accuracy.